Rambling About Creative Commons Licenses

Fake Internet Permissions

At the core, copyright and therefore all licenses are made up constructs used as a tool and don't actually exist. Because copyright is used as an authoritarian tool to the point that people can be imprisoned at worse and fined at least worst for 'violating someone's copyright', I use a CC license as a safeguard to give other people the freedom of using my works under the copyright construct. Although I believe these concepts are fake at an objective level, due to the majority of people believing these constructs and believing people should be prosecuted over these constructs do I think freer copyright licenses should be used.

Opinions On CC Licenses

CC0

Equivalent to public domain. If you truly don't want to participate in the copyright meme, this may be the best thing to use. Your work could still be legally taken and used for corrupt things that don't return the same freedoms.

CC BY

Most permissive non-public domain license. Still suffers from the fact a corrupt entity can take a work and not return the same freedoms. At least has anti-DRM clause along with rest of the licenses.

CC BY-SA

The most common copyleft license of non-software works. I view copyleft as a good way to protest the current copyright system. This license actually makes it so a corrupt entity can't just take a work and use your labor for their benefit and then hold full "All Rights Reserved" copyright to their derivative not returning the freedoms. I only consider CC BY-SA, CC BY, and CC0 to be the good CC licenses.

CC BY-NC

The start of the bad licenses. The problem with NonCommercial is that the meaning of 'NonCommercial' is pretty much up to interpretation. There was a study by Creative Commons in 2009 titled 'Defining NonCommercial' that asked creators of works and users of works their interpretations of what NonCommercial meant. The fact that CC had to essentially poll people on their interpretations proves how dumb the NonCommercial licenses are. NonCommercial also restricts others' freedoms of distribution. Depending on the interpretation the work's creator, copying digital works like writings to a physical medium and selling it to cover creation costs could be a commercial use and violate the license.

CC BY-NC-SA

Seriously, what is the actual difference between this license and the standard NC one? The standard NC license is incompatible with pretty much any other license already except this one. I know this one is ShareAlike so you have to release derivatives under the same or compatible license but the standard NC already has so much incompatibility with anything else that this license seems redundant.

CC BY-ND

NoDerivatives is actually unnecessary if you read the licenses. On the version 4.0 licenses, Section 3(a)(1)(B) says: "indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications". All license types require modifications to be stated. This is why I disagree with the opinion that CC BY-ND should be used in works stating an opinion, viewpoint, or testimony as written on GNU.org 'Various Licenses and Comments about Them' page. Assuming you're abiding by the license, any non-ND licensed derivative requires that you state the changes you made so changing someone's words to misrepresent them wouldn't do much since you have to indicate you did so and would prove your disingenuousness.

CC BY-NC-ND

The stupidity of NonCommercial and NoDerivatives in one.

Sources

Licenses directory Archive

CC BY-NC Section: Defining NonCommercial Archive

CC BY-ND Section: Various Licenses and Comments about Them, Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony) section Archive

Written 2022-9-6 Published 2022-10-1